Patrolling this underworld while publicizing his exploits in the New York press brought Roosevelt to the attention of the new president, William McKinley, who in 1897 appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt was influenced by a book by an American officer called Alfred Mahan:
In 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani tried to overturn the power of American sugar barons by rewriting Hawaii’s constitution, a move that provoked a Committee of Public Safety led by Sanford Dole, a descendant of American missionaries, to order the Honolulu Rifles to attack the palace. Charles Wilson, the royal marshal, an American loyalist in command of the 500 Royal Guards, defended the queen. The Committee appealed to the US consul, who called in the Marines. Watching them from the balcony as they set up two cannon and two Gatlings, Lili‘uokalani agreed to negotiate but refused to abdicate. Dole was declared president; but President Cleveland denounced ‘the lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts by US forces’ and ordered the queen’s restoration if she amnestied the rebels. But she refused.
In January 1895, guns for a counter-coup were found at Lili‘uokalani’s Washington Place. She was arrested, tried and sentenced to five years’ hard labour. Dole threatened to execute her supporters unless she abdicated. ‘For myself, I’d have chosen death,’ she said, but she signed. President McKinley had promised ‘no wars of conquest’, but ‘We can’t let those islands go to Japan.’* Congress annexed the islands, while Roosevelt saw the next opportunity in the rebellion of one of the last Spanish colonies, Cuba: its 350,000 slaves had been freed only ten years earlier, and the Spanish were brutally repressing rebels whom many Americans supported – even more when their leader, the poet-philosopher José Martí, was killed in battle. McKinley and Roosevelt sent a battleship, the
ROOSEVELT AND THE ROUGH RIDERS
A Spanish war would be ‘taking one more step toward the complete freeing of America from European dominion’, Roosevelt said, and would also benefit ‘our people by giving them something to think of which is not material gain’. He guided McKinley into the war, aided by the war-hungry newspapers of Willie Hearst, son of the gold mogul. Using his chain of newspapers from the
In July 1898, landing in Cuba and advancing against the Spanish at San Juan Ridge, Colonel Roosevelt, riding his horse Little Texas, gave the order to charge, riding ahead as eighty-nine of his men were killed. Roosevelt shot a Spaniard: ‘I made a vow to kill at least one,’ he said. ‘Look at all those Spanish dead.’ Hearst promoted his exploits in that ‘crowded hour’ in the liberation of Cuba, while across the Pacific, Roosevelt’s fleet routed the Spanish in Manila Bay, then seized the Philippines. Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the US, but the Filipinos, under national leader Emilio Aguinaldo, declared independence. Promising what he called ‘benevolent assimilation’ – a new euphemism for imperial conquest – for ‘the greatest good of the governed’, McKinley unleashed a colonial war, deploying waterboarding torture, killing and camps, to crush Filipino resistance. Some 200,000 were killed. Roosevelt, now McKinley’s vice-president, had helped make America a naval and Pacific power. He was not the only one obsessed with the navy.
Kaiser Wilhelm too had read Mahan, telling his mother, ‘Nelson is for me “the Master” and I shape my naval ideas and plans from his.’ Frustrated by his failure to win over Britain, he launched his
